You can love him, hate him, or anything in between — but you can’t count him out for the Republican nomination, as some people are unwisely doing. From my new Bloomberg View column:

For now, though, Christie’s chances of winning the nomination seem better than those of anyone else. And his recent troubles may help him insofar as they cause him to discard a risky strategy. Before the last few weeks, he may have thought that after winning the nomination his sheer charisma would lead him to a general-election victory. Many Republicans think that it was Romney’s lack of charisma that lost him the presidency in 2012. That’s a mistake: The actual electoral difficulties of the Republican Party run much deeper than that.

The traffic scandal makes it less likely that Christie will go down this blind alley. . . .